Review: In ‘All I See Is You,’ Sight Is Restored and a Marriage Rocked

“All I See Is You” is halfway through before something resembling a plot kicks in, and even then this limp, shape-shifting psychodrama proves unable to sell it with anything approaching coherence.

Yet the director, Marc Forster (who wrote the script with Sean Conway), fashions such a languid, tipsy aesthetic around the seemingly happy marriage of Gina and James (Blake Lively and Jason Clarke) that it’s easy to keep watching. Legally blind since childhood, Gina rarely leaves their home in Bangkok, relying almost entirely on the attentive James. But when a cornea transplant restores vision to one eye, Gina discovers that her life is not quite as she imagined.

Nor is she. New erotic interests surface during a trip to Spain, where the hypersexualized marriage of her sister and brother-in-law nudges the film into seamier territory and prompts a change in Gina’s appearance. As James becomes increasingly destabilized by his wife’s transformation, the movie seems keen to linger over what can happen to a relationship when a previously dependent partner gains agency.

Instead, we’re hastened toward a nonsensical, almost illegible ending that lays waste to all this careful mood-setting. Ms. Lively is well cast, gracefully patrolling the boundary of her limited range, with Mr. Clarke less steady in the more amorphous role of someone who seems a bit off from the outset. And though the milky visual disruptions that signal Gina’s initially blurry view of the world are overdone, there’s something seductive about her journey that cries out for a filmmaker like Nicolas Roeg. In his hands, the haze of sex and danger that surrounds these two might have been revealed as more than just a tease.